This case study reflects on the challenges in standing up a new team in an organisation that is in the midst of a company-wide change program that is seeing a significant realignment in the way that the work of the organisation is organised, and the company structure. The case study will look at ways change methodology can be applied to a greenfield site focused on customer service delivery.
Background
The Company is a national not for profit organisation providing support for people in the human service sector, primarily in supporting people with disabilities under the National Disability Insurance Scheme and for children and young people in statutory out of home care.
The company has nearly two-thousand employees in all states and territories of Australia with the vast majority of employees being in New South Wales. Some of the employees work in service outlets of up to twenty team members, in smaller residential settings with six to ten team members and some employees work on their own, sometimes in regional and remote locations.
Over the last two years, the company has been engaged in a significant restructure designed to establish self-directed work teams within a significantly flattened hierarchy. In order to achieve this, a dedicated project team was established to manage the change. The team consisted of a number of people with industry experience, project management expertise and some with various degrees of change experience including certified Change Management Practitioners.
The pressures placed on the team to close out the project meant that there was not always a strict adherence to best practice change management methodology. Some two-hundred and seventy individual teams were stood up over a period of five months. In many instances, there were low levels of Awareness or Desire for the change and team members had been unsettled by elements of the restructure which had seen layers of management and supervision removed prior to the teams undertaking workshops and training to equip them with the skills and tools to operate in the changing environment. This, in many ways, was a classic case of change management being absorbed by and project management where the priority was on delivering the project on time.
At the same time as this change was occurring, the company expanded into a state where it had not previously operated and had been awarded by that state government to provide statutory care for children and young people (Out of Home Care). The change managers in the project team were tasked with assisting to stand up a brand new team in a greenfield site.
The Challenge
As this was a new team, it was not changed in its purest sense although it was acknowledged that a number of the members of the new team would have had experience in working in more hierarchical arrangements and would not have been used to working under the new processes the company was introducing. In addition to this, the company had not, since it commenced restructuring, developed a clear process or methodology for standing up a new team. The two change managers responsible for standing up this team had to develop processes ‘on the fly’ and adapt elements of the change process being undertaken by the broader company and their own knowledge and experience of change to undertake this task.
The two change managers were based in a different state to the new team and various COVID-19 Travel Restrictions meant that it was not possible to undertake this work ‘face to face’ and so, the need to use MS Teams exclusively, placed some additional burdens on this work.
The Project
Once initial contracts had been established between the company and the funding state government department, a staged approach was taken to recruit and onboard new team members and this was undertaken by a working party established under the aegis of a single executive sponsor and drew upon members of the company’s Talent, People and Culture and Learning Development and Practice Teams along with the change managers from the company’s Practice, Safeguarding and Quality directorate.
The first step was the recruitment of a person who would be in a Service Specialist role. This person would not have direct supervisory or management responsibility for the team but would play a key role in team recruitment and onboarding and would then act as a secondary sponsor, mentor and key contact. Following the recruitment of this person, the change managers spent a lot if time working with her on the new way that the company was working. A modified Sponsorship Roadmap was established that clearly showed the Service Specialist the new ways of operating and how her role was key in establishing this team from the start. A modified employee induction program was also delivered that emphasised the new aspects of working such as the concepts of shared leadership.
Recruitment to the team was undertaken using fairly standard approaches and a team of ten was soon established. The team members came from a range of background with some having high levels of experience in youth work whilst a couple of others were recent graduates. In their first week, the new team members spent time undertaking their corporate inductions and undertook some team building exercised led by the new Service Specialist with guidance and support from the Learning, Diversity and Practice Team.
The change managers form Practice, Safeguarding and Quality became more involved in week two and commenced a number of workshops with the new team.
The Workshops
The change managers developed a program of four three-hour workshops based on material that they had produced for the existing teams transitioning to the new ways or working. The workshops consisted of a number of elements:
- An overview of the changes that were happening across the company including the benefits of a flattened hierarchy, shared leadership and decision making within the team.
- The development of an agreed Team Purpose Statement to clearly articulate what the team understood to be their role that was focussed on person centred customer service delivery.
- An exercise where the team identified and allocated all of their team tasks.
- The team developed a set of Ground Rules that aligned with the organisation’s values and described how the team members would treat each other and what were their expectations.
- A skills exercise where the team developed their own priority learning plan for the next six months and identified the training, they would need both as a team and as individuals.
- A team communication plan that identified the role members would play in sharing information and coordination in the team.
- A set of goals to work towards over the next six months.
In the final workshops, the change managers took the team through a process to identify the team members’ Intrinsic Motivators and explained how this could be used on a regular basis for the team to check in with each other.
The final piece of work was an introduction in Group Professional Supervision which was led by one of the change managers who had been approved by the company to facilitate these sessions. This session also further explored shared leadership and a process for ethical decision making including the team establishing some guidelines on how they would arrive at final decisions (such as when they wanted consensus, when they would vote and whether there needed to be a simple majority or something else and how decisions could be made that impacted the whole team when the whole team was not available).
Following the completion of the workshops, a celebration was held to officially ‘launch the team’.
Lessons
The main lesson learned was that tools such as ADKAR could be used in what essentially wasn’t a change but was introducing a method of working in a new team that had not necessarily been the experience of the team members.
Awareness:
It was critical to position the way the company was structuring its work in such a way that team members could see the benefits to them and to the customers and how shared leadership and a flattened structure made the team more responsive and had greater agency over their work. The preliminary work with the Service Specialist meant that the language and concepts of this new way of working were there from the start and formed part of the recruitment process.
Desire:
The new way of working was particularly appealing to this cohort of primarily younger workers with high levels of education and was contrasted with other parts of the company where there had been a lack of awareness setting with what was a somewhat hostile and resistant workforce. Throughout the workshops and notwithstanding the difficulties of remote delivery, the team remained engaged and enthusiastic and viewed this as being a real opportunity for them to be able to put their own stamp on their workplace.
Knowledge:
The high levels of Awareness and Desire meant that the job of imparting knowledge in the different way of working was not difficult and this team had a much higher rate of participation by individuals in creating the outputs than a number of other teams.
Ability:
The ability of the team to work in the new method will be monitored over coming months but the early implementation of Reflective Practice, Intrinsic Motivators and Goal Setting has given the team the tools to evaluate and build on their ability and the positioning of the Service Specialist as a sponsor has provided her with a range of tools to support the team.
Reinforcement:
This is a new team and has not reached this stage but processes have been established from the beginning by the change managers to undertake reinforcement activities with the team over the coming year.
Conclusion
The successful launch of this team with a detailed Team Agreement and Work Plan within a short piece of time has reinforced the fact that change management methodology can be an effective set of tools to use with a greenfield site who, generally, might not be seen to be undertaking change as such but will be working in a model that is new for the sector and which team members might not be used to.
The ADKAR tools and Sponsorship Roadmap were integral to being able to establish and launch a new team and to develop strong relationships and shared leadership in an environment where there were a number of restrictions brought about by COVID-19 and the need to have the team established fairly rapidly.
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